Experienced-based Results with Preparations for the Use of Automatic Calculation in Biology

Abstract

Your amazement at seeing me as a speaker at a congress of such highly specialized medicine will certainly be no less than mine! The reason for my being here is that I was invited to make public the advice I gave to the scholars of Gallarate when they told me that they intended to make a statistical survey of the sector of multiple sclerosis in order to run automatic calculations. My experience is in a completely different sector. It is in linguistics, in which we have worked on nine different languages in four different alphabets: Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Cyrillic. Yet, it is obvious that such experience has commonalities with any other experience of the use of computers. Therefore, I should like to illustrate what preparation is necessary and sufficient for the use of automatic calculation: obviously that which is common to the use of computers in any field, from linguistics to physics, and from psychology to medicine.